At the end of his 1998 pamphlet on the "ecology of fear," the destruction of natural habitats in and around Los Angeles by the real estate boom, Mike Davis views the California metropolis from space.

On that April afternoon when race riots erupted in LA over the abuse of black cab driver Rodney King, a weather satellite orbiting over California registered "an extraordinary thermal anomaly" covering nearly a hundred square miles.

It was the flaming writing of the fires started by angry blacks and Latinos that spread with the speed of a bushfire in the southern city center.

According to Davis, if a voyeur could have seen the earth from Mars,

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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In the short passage, three main motifs of Davis' journalistic work come together.

The first is the conjuration of the apocalypse, which for him is both a vision of salvation and of doom.

The second is the blending of natural and historical catastrophes.

For Davis, who took Marxism literally or metaphorically as he saw fit, the two were inseparable.

He analyzed the activities of the land speculators, who transformed the plain between downtown LA and the Pacific into a mosaic of single-family houses, with the eye of a geologist;

he described the chain of earthquakes, heat waves and fires that regularly afflict the City of Angels in the style of a science fiction writer.

The third and overarching theme of urban sociologist Mike Davis was the fascination with Los Angeles.

The Californian metropolis, in whose north-eastern suburbs he grew up, became his life's work and a journalistic battlefield on which he had to assert himself against numerous academic and populist critics.

When he settled back in Los Angeles in 1987, after studying history at UCLA and working for years as editor of London's New Left Review, he found a city he said had changed beyond recognition.

To understand what he saw, he wrote a book that combined the Hollywood dream factory, the urbanization of the countryside, the economic and social segregation, and the environmental degradation of metropolitan LA into a mental panorama.

It was his breakthrough.

Anyone who has traveled to Los Angeles since the 1990s and wanted to experience more than a tourist had "City of Quartz" with them.

It didn't matter that Davis was carrying all sorts of ideological baggage from his days as a trade unionist and left-wing activist.

What mattered was the tone of his descriptions, which combined the coolness of the historian with the feverish gesture of the columnist.

For the intellectual public of a city where history is said to last only five years, City of Quartz was a wake-up call.

From then on, Los Angeles became a fixed topos of American urban studies and sociology.

When the follow-up volume “Ecology of Fear” was published, Davis noticed from the polemics he had unleashed that he had become the star of his guild.

After that he wrote many more books and essays on plagues, slums, Las Vegas, historic famines, terrorism and migration.

Not being able to found an academic school is not a blemish but a blessing as his students are everywhere now.

Mike Davis died on Tuesday, far from Los Angeles in San Diego, California.

He was seventy-six years old.